‘Our 999 service must meet the needs of patients’

Dr Anthony Marsh is blunt when he tells you the patient is not doing as well as expected.

His diagnosis for the East of England Ambulance Service Trust, of which he has been chief executive for four weeks, is hopeful, but he makes it plain that six months has been lost through lack of action.

Dr Marsh has already turned around Essex and West Midlands ambulance services, having worked his way to the top since joining Essex Ambulance Service as a non-emergency ambulance man in 1987. On top of ambulance qualifications, he holds an MBA and MSc in strategic leadership and an honorary doctorate for work in emergency preparedness, so he backs experience with management qualifications

At the end of last year it was announced he would become EEAST’s chief executive alongside the same role in West Midlands.

He first became involved in EEAST in April 2013 when concerns expressed by MPs resulted in the NHS Trust Development Authority asking him to conduct a governance review. His report, published in June, was damning, speaking of good frontline staff frustrated by a management that failed to listen or to implement change and seemed to exhibit a culture of helplessness, accepting things ‘were as they were’.

Last week, Dr Marsh admitted: “In part, that’s still the problem, in spite of the non-executive directors, and some of the executive directors, leaving, insufficient progress has been made in the six months to Christmas.

“If they had accepted my report and done something about it in June, I wouldn’t be sitting here now.

“The people who have led the organisation I genuinely think did their best – they weren’t bad people – but I don’t think they were sufficiently clear about what the priorities are and they weren’t seeing them through.”

He believes his frontline experience matters, though he accepts the service has changed since he started.

“The feedback I’m getting from staff is that they believe they have an ambulance chief in post who gets what what they do,” he said. “They haven’t been sufficiently supported in the past.

“We deal with 3,000 emergency calls a day. We don’t want to be tied down with overly bureaucratic systems that delay decision making and aren’t supporting staff.

“The staff are working in uncomfortable circumstances. At this moment I could have staff now going up a motorway embankment, it could be raining, it would be cold. Staff could be in a situation where they are threatened by people. We need to support them.

“We need sufficient numbers to do the job and when they are dealing with a challenging case we need to give them support.”

Action has already been taken on numbers. They will no longer take on the lower qualified emergency care assistants, but announced last Friday they are recruiting 400 student paramedics. He wants to have a paramedic on every emergency ambulance, which will take time.

He wants to make sure he is making best use of staff by having fewer response cars and more emergency ambulances and to have a fleet of vehicles that are all under five years old, but, again that takes time. Emergency ambulances are built to order and even then there is the question of the manufacturers having the factory schedule slots to build them, so they are ordering 50 now knowing that it may be the end of the year before we see them all.

Response times have been a bugbear in the East. Though EEAST has usually met times across the region, there has been criticism of response times in rural areas.

He said the target of reaching 75 per cent of emergency calls in 8 minutes was across the region, so the 25 per cent takes account of longer times in rural areas.

But he added: “It does seem to me that we need to provide a service that meets the needs of the patients rather than a tick-box response time.”